The same experience of failure and disappointment which proves our
purpose to have been, from the standpoint of enlargement and enrichment
of the self, a mistaken one brings a clearer consciousness of the logic
implicit in our first confident belief in the purpose, and at the same
time emphasizes the need of making this logic explicit. The purpose, as
warranted to us by the conditions and assembled means that lay before
us, was our own, and _as our own_ was implicitly a purpose of
furtherance of the self. The disappointment that has come brings this
implication more clearly into view, and likewise the need of methodical
procedure, not as before in the determination of _conditions_, but in
the determination of purposes as such; for the essence of the situation
is that the _execution_ of the purpose has brought to light some
unforeseen consequence now recognized as having been all the while in
the nature of things involved in the purpose. This consequence or group
of consequences consists (in general terms) in the abatement or arrest
of desirable modes of activity which find their motivation elsewhere in
the agent's system of accepted ends, and it is registered in
consciousness in that sense of restriction or repression from without
which is a notable phase of all emotional experience, particularly in
its early stages. The consequences are as undesirable as they are
unexpected, and the reaction against them, at first emotional, presently
passes over into the form of a reflective interpretation of the
situation to the effect that the self has suffered a loss by reason of
its thoughtless haste in identifying itself with so unsafe a
purpose.[131]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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